The charming and frequently hilarious "How's Your News?" was born as a project at a summer camp for people with disabilities, but it's on MTV - starting Sunday, Feb. 8 at 9:30 p.m. - thanks to Matt Stone and Trey Parker, the "South Park" dudes.

The traveling TV newsmagazine visits New Orleans in an upcoming episode, for which a longer Inkasaurus story is planned.

To preview the premier, Stone and some of the cast met with members of the Television Critics Association at the January TV Tour in Los Angeles, and Stone was asked about how he and his partner got involved.

As it happened, he and Parker saw the camp video produced by the participants, and summoned Arthur Bradford, the camp video-class instructor, to Hollywood.

"This was before 'South Park' was on the air, so we were just camping out in L.A., and I think we called Arthur and said, 'Hey, we want to finance doing a little more of this or on kind of a bigger level,'" Stone said. "And so we flew him out here, and he slept on our couch for a couple days, because we weren't that high-flying.

"I think he thought he was going to come out and meet some
Hollywood producers, but it was just me and Trey. And we've just been kind of -- godfathering is probably the best word for it -- godfathering the project, which has constantly changed over the last 10 years."

Before it became a series, in fact, the project took the form of standalone documentaries for other cable networks.

"This is good," Stone said. "This is not something that needs to be thought of as a PBS special or a special that needs to be over there in this box. This is, like, actually good. This is good and this is as good as anything on television.

"When we started talking about where would we go pitch this, MTV was kind of at the top, because MTV's one of those Rorschach things. Everybody has their opinion about what MTV is, but it certainly is youth culture and vibrant and it's America today. It isn't ghettoized. It isn't, 'These people have to be on PBS.' Or, 'This kind of show, it's over here for this kind of audience. It's, 'No, we want to go right to the center of the universe.'"